Magnetic cards have many purposes. Examples include credit cards, debit cards, medical and insurance cards, drug payment cards, health care service cards, stored value cards, identification cards, access entry cards, and the like. Many of these cards have information stored in a magnetic stripe, for provision to communicate with a POS (Point of Sale) system. Many useful conversions to a card format are possible, including licenses, permits, ez-pass, security and many other potential variations on the general theme.
At the same time, portable user devices such as smart mobile phones and wireless computers, offer a wide variety of information and communication capabilities to the user. Some portable user devices augment the use of magnetic cards by allowing, for example, the modification of information in the magnetic strip of the cards. There are also mobile devices which interface to magnetic stripe readers through the use of a card slot. Additionally, there are card readers that are completely internal to a secure facade, such as that typically found at an ATM (automated teller machine). Many competing methods have been proposed to collapse or contain multiple cards into one card.
The operating systems, software, services and applications of today have not been streamlined to accept biometrics for more than a verification step for payment, or initial logging. Processing a multi-biometric for each keystroke may tax a system 200 to 10000 fold.